How Organic SEO and PPC Impact Each Other

How do organic SEO and PPC impact each other?

In many organizations, the paid search team that runs PPC campaigns and the SEO team that focuses on organic search are completely separate departments. They run parallel to each other, even sometimes competing with one another. In truth, however, research run by Google itself has found that these two work together.

There have been multiple studies that have demonstrated that SEO impacts how many clicks PPC ads receive. Google has found that when a site has strong organic search results, they will increase their click-through rate for their PPC ads on the same SERP. Another study found that the phenomenon can also work in reverse-- paid search can also boost the results of organic campaigns.

How to use organic and PPC together to maximize results

To take advantage of the organic search and PPC connection, you need to bring your two teams together so that they understand how to work towards a common goal. For example, if you want to increase exposure for your organic keywords that do not rank very highly, you can design a campaign like this:

Bring your organic and your paid search teams together and have them set goals for this integrated campaign

Focus on bringing together organic search efforts that have high search volume, but a page ranking between 4 and 10 with PPC keywords for which you generally perform well. If you are a BrightEdge user, you can accomplish this by going to the “Reports” tab on your BrightEdge platform and filtering your keywords for “Ranked on Page 1” for your PPC campaigns and “ranked on Page 4 to 10” for your organic keywords.

Develop a campaign that emphasizes the exposure of both sets of keywords. On BrightEdge, you can use your dashboard to track traffic from your organic keywords with previously little exposure and the success of your PPC campaign.

Throughout your campaign, continue to monitor how well your keywords are performing as well as the progress of your competitors. This will help alert you to new potential keywords that can be used and potential holes in your own campaigns.

The link between organic SEO and paid search campaigns is just another way to demonstrate that a successful marketing department today cannot be siloed. Bring your teams together and see how this link can be put to work for you.